The discovery of dinosaurs and other large extinct ‘saurians’, a term under which the Victorians commonly lumped ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and their kin, makes exciting reading. The story of how early ‘fossilists’ first found the remains of these ‘primeval monsters’ has been told again and again in popular and semi-popular books about the history of palaeontology. Mary Anning making a living by collecting extinct reptiles along the Dorset coast, William Buckland and Gideon Mantell finding the ‘terrible lizards’ for which Richard Owen was to coin the word ‘Dinosauria’, O. C. Marsh and E. D. Cope fighting over new fossil vertebrates in the American West – all of these well-known stories have almost achieved the status of legends, and have often been retold with little regard for historical or scientific accuracy. <...>

Having grown up reading that birds were at most only distantly related to dinosaurs, I was both startled and fascinated when a growing number of researchers began to argue that birds were the direct descendants of the terrible lizards. At the end of the 1970s, I was becoming involved in the ar¬ gument both as an artist and a scientist. Art and science could not be separated; the science deter¬ mined whether I should adorn the small predatory dinosaurs with scales or with feathers. Alas, there was no simple answer at the time, because there was no fossil evidence for either possibility. What I found disturbing was that many paleontologists were totally biased against illustrating dinosaurs with feathers, even though the available data was neutral on the subject. This bias only boosted my interest in researching bird origins. <...>

Melanosomes are the tiny hollows inside hairs or feathers that contain melanin. Melanin is a pigment that gives the black, brown, grey, and ginger colours to hairs and feathers. We were the first ever – or at least the first on record – to have seen evidence of melanosomes in dinosaurs. If we had got it right, this was evidence of the original colour of their feathers. We could say that for the first time we had discovered for sure the colour of a dinosaur.

Non-bird dinosaurs (“dinosaurs”) are very much in the news these days: dinosaurs had feathers; dinosaurs were warm-blooded; dinosaurs were snuffed out in mere seconds; we’ve just discovered the largest dinosaur ever; we’ve just discovered the smallest dinosaur ever; here is Jurassic World, there is The Good Dinosaur. . . it’s a media blizzard. And why not? Ideas about dinosaurs have moved conceptually far beyond the twentieth century: a few weirdo reptiles that lived on this planet, but were too stupid to survive. Today dinosaurs are recognized as centerpieces of vertebrate evolution; they’re just a whole lot more interesting than they used to be!